Russian arms transfer to Armenia alleged (or "Командкещи подарил акаСии")

Azeri complaints about Russian support for Armenia appear to be back in vogue - this may be another sign we have in fact cleared the post-9/11/01-period and are now in post-8/8/08 period that as far as Caucasus is concerned is more like the post-1991 and pre-2001 period of Russian regional military hegemony (and low oil prices!).

On January 8, MediaForum.az uploaded what looks like a two-page secret unsigned undated attachment on the letterhead of a Russian general – Viacheslav Golovchenko, deputy commander of the Russian forces in the Caucasus - that lists the types of weapons allegedly transferred from Russian base in Armenia to Armenian defense ministry.

The alleged document (in Russian below) contains a couple of grammatical errors and typos: specifically the words АкаЦия and Командующий are misspelled. This may be either because the alleged document is a forgery or just a legitimate scanning error.

UPDATE from a colleague: Two more typos found "катИгория" instead of "категория," and "гранатАмет" instead of "гранатомет." This makes it look more like a forgery.

The document lists as transferred: 21 tanks; 61 armored combat vehicles; 50 units of self-propelled and towed artillery; 9 MLRS systems; various air defense systems; light weapons; ammunition stockpiles; and equipment.

Nothing extraordinary and in relatively modest amount especially compared to massive acquisitions advertised by Azerbaijan in recent years.

If it is a real document, it most likely ended up in Azerbaijan as a result of being handed over by the Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdiukov who was in Baku in December for annual talks on bilateral defense cooperation.

Earlier in 2008, Russia reported to the United Nations that it transferred dozens of tanks and armored vehicles to Azerbaijan.

If it in fact occurred, this Russia to Armenia transfer may have been in part to offset deliveries to Azerbaijan.

But unlike their Armenian colleagues, Azeri media is seeking to make this into a big story having promptly converted the equipment list to an inflated dollar figure presumably for easy use in a PR campaign in the West (in a manner similar to the "1 billion dollar" campaign of the 1990s).

Members of the Azeri ruling clique have internalized the transfer as fact and branded it as a "scandal," "illegal," "sign of aggression" and "unfair."

Azeris threaten Armenia with ballistic missiles, cluster munitions

First published in July 5, 2008 Armenian Reporter.

Azerbaijan parades newly acquired military arsenal
Missiles shown put Yerevan within striking distance
News analysis by Emil Sanamyan

WASHINGTON – In an unusually candid display of military technology that combined Soviet-era grandeur with Azerbaijan’s increasingly Middle Eastern flair, President Ilham Aliyev showed off newly acquired missile systems and spy planes in a grand parade held in Baku last week.

In contrast to combat aircraft already known to have been in Azerbaijan’s possession, the new systems’ characteristics make them more difficult for the Armenian armed forces to deal with successfully.

New missile threat

According to television footage and photos available online, the June 26 parade included at least three of the late-Soviet-model SS-21 tactical surface-to-surface ballistic missiles known in the West as “Scarab” and in Russia as "Tochka."

Depending on specific modifications, SS-21s are capable of delivering payloads of 482 kilograms, which could be either conventional or containing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), to distances between 15 and 120 kilometers, landing with deadly accuracy of between several to 50 meters.

Armenia’s capital city, Yerevan, is located within 70 kilometers of Azerbaijani-controlled Nakhichevan and within 100 kilometers of the Kedabek district of Azerbaijan, bordering on Armenia’s Gegharkunik province, putting the city within SS-21 reach from both directions.

Under international agreements, Azerbaijan – along with other states – is required to report on any such military acquisitions. No such declarations were made through the the United Nations Register of Conventional Weapons as of August 2007, suggesting that the acquisition was either recent or made without notification.

According to a 2005 Carnegie Endowment study, “World Missile Chart,” following the Soviet collapse, SS-21 systems were inherited by Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Slovakia. (In the early- to mid-1980s, older variants had also been supplied to Syria and Yemen.)

Of these countries, Ukraine has been the most active supplier of weapons systems to Azerbaijan.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, Boris Klimchuk, confirmed to Novosti-Azerbaijan that most of the equipment paraded on June 26 was supplied by Ukraine.

Also shown at the parade were at least six multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) known in Russian as Smerch (see the March 27, 2007, issue of the Armenian Reporter for a story about their acquisition from Ukraine). That deadly system, with a range of over 70 kilometers, was paraded along with other smaller-caliber and shorter-range non-Soviet MLRS systems that appeared Israeli or Turkish in origin.

Israeli-made spy planes

Other systems whose acquisition had not been made public prior to the parade were two types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), both made by Israel’s Aeronautics Defense Systems (ADS).

UAVs have been prominent in the regional news lately after Georgia purchased about 40 Hermes-450 systems made by Israel’s Elbit Systems and several of them were reported shot down over Abkhazia since last spring. UAVs are relatively inexpensive systems capable of supplying round-the-clock battlefield reconnaissance while evading many of the traditional air defense systems.

Per video and photography from the Azerbaijani parade, the systems shown were not Elbit’s but ADS’ short-range Orbiter and midrange Aerostar UAVs.

According to www.IsraeliWeapons.com, Orbiter is a very light system that military personnel could transport in backpacks and assemble for launch within 10 minutes.

Operated remotely, it has a range of 15 kilometers, providing real-time intelligence to brigade or smaller-sized units.

First introduced in 2000, Aerostar is believed to be superior to the older Hermes-450. Aerostar, similar in appearance to popular Cessna aircraft, has an operational range of 200 kilometers, which can potentially put Armenia’s entire territory under surveillance.

Both the SS-21 and the other newly acquired missile systems and the UAVs provide a greater challenge than earlier systems did to the mostly ground-based Armenian air defenses. They may thus help tip the existing military balance and undermining the 14-year-old cease-fire.

Lukewarm international reaction

There has been no public Armenian or international reaction to systems shown in the militaristic display. Of major news outlets, only the Reuters news agency carried a report, pointing, as usual, to a potential disruption of 700,000 barrels a day in oil supplies should fighting resume.

Armenian Defense Ministry spokesperson Col. Seyran Shahsuvaryan was not impressed, telling PanArmenian.net on June 28 that his agency viewed the parade as a “festivity” organized for the local population and foreign guests.

Since 1998 Azerbaijan has marked June 26 as a day of its army because on that day in 1918, the Ottoman Turkish army divisions advancing into the Caucasus and led by Nuri Pasha (younger brother of Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister) were renamed “Azerbaijani national army.”

In all, according to the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry, the parade involved 25 combat aircraft (including several MiG-29s acquired in Ukraine), 19 helicopters, 31 navy vessels, and 210 units of ground equipment, including tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, self-propelled and towed artillery, and air defense systems. Various special forces and cadets of ground, air, and naval military academies were among about 4,500 personnel taking part.

Writing for Novosti-Azerbaijan on June 27, Azerbaijani journalist and Karabakh war veteran Kamal Ali could not hide his excitement.

“Even a quick look at the military equipment shown in the June 26 parade assures one of the offensive nature of Azerbaijan’s war machine,” he wrote. “Nearly all of this equipment was created for an effective attacks and annihilation of a defending opponent.”

Certainly, the parade last week did send a message to Armenia and cannot be treated solely as a “festivity.”

Equipment shown and the manner of its acquisition should have real military and political repercussions both for Armenian armed forces and foreign policy.

Karabakh status quo - how much longer?

First published in June 7, 2008 Armenian Reporter.

Can Armenia and Azerbaijan sustain the status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh?
News analysis by Emil Sanamyan

STEPANAKERT – On June 6, Serge Sargsian and Ilham Aliyev will have held their first presidential meeting. While seen as a mere formality, the rendezvous sets up yet another fork in the road in the 20-year history of the Armenian-Azerbaijani confrontation.

By now there are few expectations of a negotiated peace deal or even agreement on basic principles for such an agreement. The sides are rigidly dug into their mutually exclusive positions. One side wants to retain Karabakh and formalize its reunification with Armenia. The other is seeking to restore its Soviet-era borders and heal its hurt pride.

While the conflict had violently escalated for the first six years (1988-94) it has been largely conserved for the last fourteen. The main question of today is if this conservation will continue to last or if violence would break out in some form.

The peace process: how much longer?

As has been the case with Armenian-Azerbaijani presidential meetings since after the April 2001 Key West summit dedicated to the Karabakh settlement, this week’s meetings takes place on sidelines of a larger international forum the two presidents are attending anyway. This time it is the post-Soviet economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia.

President Aliyev, Jr. and ex-President Robert Kocharian have had seven such meetings between 2004 and 2007, providing the political blessing for sustained negotiations between the two countries’ foreign ministers.

The peace process, while failing to culminate in any agreement, has provided both leaders with added international recognition and domestic legitimacy. And importantly it has helped “explain” why, in spite of all the heated rhetoric, Azerbaijan is not going back to war just yet.

Azeri officials, at least publicly, still hope that Armenians might give up without a fight. That increasingly remote possibility may have taken a new lease on life because Azeris view the return to active politics of ex-President Levon Ter-Petrossian in the context of his past Karabakh policy rather than Armenia’s domestic developments.

The second important self-explanation for Azerbaijan is that the next several years would mean more money recovered from Caspian offshore energy resources and more weapon systems bought and mastered.

This is also the view endorsed by conflict watchers around the world, including the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG), which in an analysis last year predicted that chances for war may increase significantly in 2012 when Azerbaijan’s oil production begins to taper off.

The last, but possibly the most important explanation, on why the cease-fire has held is the Armenian military’s capability to retaliate against Azerbaijani interests.

In his remarks on May 23 and again in an interview on June 5, NKR President Bako Sahakian warned that should Azerbaijan launch a military aggression, the Armenian side will be forced to take the fighting “deep into [Azerbaijan’s] territory,” adding that “expansion of the security zone [comprising former Azeri districts around Karabakh] will be the only way for us to secure peace for our people.”

The stark warning is atypical of Armenian leaders and also reflects Azerbaijan’s expanded ability to escalate things along the Line of Contact without resorting to an outright war.

Even the mediators’ focus appears to be shifting from discussing complicated Karabakh status formulas and territorial arrangements to sustaining the cease-fire and preventing new bloodshed through practical measures along the Line of Contact.

New potential for [localized] military escalation

With conclusion of the on the ground military operations in May 1994, when Baku finally agreed to a cease-fire agreement since then made permanent, the Azerbaijani government has sought to find ways to put foreign diplomatic pressure on Armenians to force them into unilateral territorial compromises.

Dubbed the “oil strategy” by then President Heydar Aliyev, Azerbaijanis staked their hopes on their relative importance to the West and Armenia’s apparently bleak economic prospects.

In that they scored a partial success at the OSCE’s Lisbon Summit in December 1996, where Armenia was left alone in not recognizing Azerbaijan’s claims on Nagorno Karabakh. Then President Ter-Petrossian’s advocacy for unilateral territorial compromises in 1997-98 reflected the peak of the success of the Aliyev Sr.’s strategy.

President Kocharian’s ascendancy has helped alter that dynamic. In the ten-year period, Armenia has succeeded in establishing that its economic development and integration with the West can proceed without unilateral territorial compromises in Karabakh.

Increased economic affluence of both Armenia and Azerbaijan has also made going to an outright war an increasingly unattractive proposition.

But the Armenian-Azerbaijan confrontation appears to be nearing a fresh turning point. Azerbaijan seems to have exhausted its diplomatic options with the United Nations General Assembly resolution last March. And the very acquisition of new weapons systems makes it tempting for Aliyev to escalate military pressure on Armenia without resorting to costly ground operations.

In the past ten years, tactical military escalation has meant primarily spikes in sniper war and small-scale tactical redeployments along the Line of Contact, with the March 3 skirmish at Levonarkh in Karabakh’s northeast as the latest example.

Today, Azerbaijan’s acquisition of modern aircraft and longer-range artillery systems may encourage its leaders to resort to new and more dramatic forms of military escalation.

These may include attempts to overfly Armenian territory, attacks against Armenian air and ground targets, and even engaging in long-distance artillery duels – all in the effort to put pressure on the local population to flee and up the ante for the Armenian state.

The Armenian side has made clear that such steps would be met with retaliation and would risk an all-out war which both sides are so far seeking to avoid. At the same time, such warnings have not been matched by a sustained diplomatic campaign to restrain Azerbaijan.

Judging by Azerbaijan’s accelerated military acquisitions and evolution of similarly protracted conflicts around the world, the fourteen-year peace enjoyed by Armenians and Azerbaijanis increasingly stands out as an oddity rather than the norm and appears to be nearing a tipping point.